tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63005590601899244232024-03-17T21:10:30.403+00:00ComicAllyAll comics and book reviews, all the time!Noelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03936275600540998073noreply@blogger.comBlogger3788125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6300559060189924423.post-80984827306403142202024-03-12T20:28:00.000+00:002024-03-12T20:28:08.691+00:00The Easter Parade by Richard Yates Review<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbDujX1WRGedNKrMUSB9fW4Oa3o6NZeMZ9nFSEaatslW-mHGfebUNYSIpQU5IPg_X0IpOQG64_VORghw0qyGFeyzTgUstiEcNVSpqEH6gENhMr4KPR4VHcxAMHbyPN2c-MD6hdUjsOT2eNTaxwkAWL7AQPC6aLTXKqKMjlwhvihsuzZ3R13L4pdXA_K7Wd" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="261" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhbDujX1WRGedNKrMUSB9fW4Oa3o6NZeMZ9nFSEaatslW-mHGfebUNYSIpQU5IPg_X0IpOQG64_VORghw0qyGFeyzTgUstiEcNVSpqEH6gENhMr4KPR4VHcxAMHbyPN2c-MD6hdUjsOT2eNTaxwkAWL7AQPC6aLTXKqKMjlwhvihsuzZ3R13L4pdXA_K7Wd" width="157" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><br />This is the story of Emily Grimes, from her childhood in the 1930s to her late ‘40s in the 1970s, and the people in her life: her older sister Sarah, her mother Esther or “Pookie”, and her father Walter, as well as the numerous men she has relationships with.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I can’t review The Easter Parade properly without mentioning details so, even though this isn’t a plot-heavy book, some people might consider these details “spoilers”. If that’s a concern and you’re thinking of checking this book out, then stop reading now; it’s an excellent novel, well worth reading and highly enjoyable, if very dark - if domestic abuse is too much, give this one a miss.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Everyone else, let’s go!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">If you know the name Richard Yates, maybe the one thing you’ve heard about his writing is that it’s very depressing (the other thing you may have heard about him is that his daughter Monica dated a young Larry David and became the inspiration for Elaine on Seinfeld!). I’m not saying that perception is wrong - the final third of The Easter Parade is especially bleak - but that it’s perhaps overstated and ultimately reductive of Yates’ superlative art.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Most of this novel is actually fairly upbeat. I read it thinking that there was nothing depressing about Emily’s life - she had setbacks and lost her father young but these aren’t exceptionally sad or unique. Her sister Sarah married young and had three sons while Emily went to university, got work as a journalist and copywriter, and had relationships with various men like an academic, a poet and a lawyer.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">If anything, Emily is a kind of role model for the newly-emerging independent woman of the mid-20th century, without Yates standing on a soapbox and preaching about feminism (you might even view that odd scene at the end when Emily goes to a women’s masturbation class meant to empower women and sees the models of vaginas with distaste as a rejection of modern feminism).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">What I did notice as a consistent theme was illusions and how characters often lied to one another and themselves. That and the constant presence of hard alcohol, perhaps as necessary fuel for the characters to continue their delusions. And why pretend and lie? This is where the “depressing” aspect of Yates’ fiction emerges as you realise none of the characters are particularly happy with their lives and don’t know how to change them.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Emily’s father drank heavily because he never did what he wanted to do with his career. Similarly, her mother became an alcoholic because she couldn’t find whatever it was she was looking for. Even minor characters like Sarah’s first possible fiance fabricates an entire work history to seem more appealing to his potential in-laws.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The saddest character is of course Sarah, Emily’s older sister, whose seemingly idealistic marriage was nothing but a sham. Her husband Tony was secretly a mean, abusive drunk who might’ve even possibly murdered her in a drunken rage. Sarah quietly endures the constant domestic abuse, in the process becoming an alcoholic herself to help get herself through it all and soften her painful reality and only after many years does she slowly reveal her horrible life to Emily.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Even Emily, who seems to have the best life out of them all, ends up lost and drinking herself into blackouts, waking up in strange apartments next to men she doesn’t remember meeting, let alone going home with. Maybe it’s an unfortunate familial trait, or maybe she too is unhappy with her life - she never married, never had kids, and, while she makes her living writing copy at an ad agency, her own writing never went anywhere. Like her father, she wanted to be a great writer and fell short of it - booze can help with the disappointment, to a point.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">That’s something I really liked about Yates’ writing: Emily is clearly the main character and meant to be the one the reader connects with, but he makes her flawed and weak as well, which only endears her more to us because she’s more relatable. Throughout the story we catch glimpses of her character and see her as selfish, spiteful and conceited.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">You could even interpret her fury at the end of the novel as directed at herself - Sarah called her near the end, trying to escape certain death with Tony, and Emily turned her away because it wasn’t convenient for her. Sure, maybe Tony killed her, maybe it really was a combination of alcoholism and an accidental fall, and maybe she would’ve died regardless - maybe her alcoholism was too far gone by that stage. But maybe she wouldn’t have died if Emily had been there for her, gotten her away from Tony, dried her out, given her a new lease on life.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">All of which sounds like Yates’ reputation as a depressing writer is well earned - but no more so than say Steinbeck or Shirley Jackson and his writing is deservedly up there with such exalted company. The Easter Parade is a masterpiece of character work, capturing the highs and lows of life at its different stages, while also telling a complex and always intriguing story of a family of fascinating characters. I loved The Easter Parade and highly recommend seeking out the books of this author if you haven’t already. An amazing achievement from a perennially-underrated writer.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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And if there’s one thing you wouldn’t like Hulk to be, it’s… y’know. Meanwhile, an ancient evil is resurrected and with it awakens a new Age of Monsters. Their sights are set on the biggest monster of all: </span><s style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">yo mama!</s><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"> Hulk.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Nic Klein take over Hulk from Donny Cates and Ryan Ottley and their first book is actually pretty decent, though more for the art than anything else.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The first issue is absolutely cracking. Really fast-paced, exciting set-up issue where the premise, characters, and threats are well established with Klein really impressing with the art. I had low expectations going into this one because I haven’t enjoyed anything Johnson’s written to date but he wrote the hell out of that issue - great stuff.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Then… the not-so-great stuff, ie. the rest of the book, which doesn’t live up to the opener. The story of the undead Bible-bashers in an abandoned mining town sees Johnson emulating the worst traits of Tom King’s writing by copying out song lyrics in lieu of a script, in what wasn’t all that compelling a story either. But, again, Klein’s art is so damn strong that even if the words did nothing, the visuals definitely held the attention. The way he draws Hulk bursting out of Banner’s body is really something.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Travel Foreman takes over the art for the next story, which is a good choice given that he’s a talented horror artist and Johnson’s Hulk is ostensibly a horror book. Man-Thing cameos in this one, which is nice to see as he’s very much a fringe Marvel character, but the story is again no great shakes with Hulk and Man-Thing teaming up to fight a giant crab. None of these monsters are real threats to Hulk, so it’s not exciting to see him fight them as we know he’ll easily smash them (and does).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The final story is the annual, written by David Pepose with art from Caio Majado. It’s a found-footage story where a film crew sets out to do a Blair Witch-style doc about the Hulk. It has that “footage hasn’t been edited” disclaimer at the start but the chronology is very much in the style of a superhero comic which immediately shatters the already-feeble illusion. It’s also not much of a story - Hulk fights what looks to be Giganto - with Majado’s art failing to measure up to the heights of Klein or even Foreman’s that preceded it.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Banner’s new sidekick, the angry teen runaway Charlie, who idolises the Hulk but not Banner, is an intriguing new addition, mainly to see what role she’ll play in Hulk’s revenge on Banner. The monsters after Hulk are less so as they just don’t seem like a viable threat. And though I love me some horror, I’d’ve much preferred if the focus of this book had been on the conflict between Banner and Hulk, which is vastly more compelling than seeing Hulk effortlessly topple one contrived monster after another. Hopefully we see more of that in future books and less monster-of-the-week action.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The Incredible Hulk, Volume 1: Age of Monsters has some of the best art in a Hulk book I’ve seen for some time courtesy of Nic Klein, and Phillip Kennedy Johnson’s story has some promising excitement to it, like how Hulk and Banner resolve their current beef. A lot of the book though has too much blah Hulk/monster action that simply isn’t interesting enough, making this first book more of a visual treat than a storytelling one. Not a bad start to this new Hulk series though and I’ll keep an eye out for the next one.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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But if it’s not Adam Warlock/Magus in their latest cocoon, who is it? Meanwhile, Rocket battles space cancer - gee I wonder if he’ll overcome it? Have Faith.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Donny Cates’ second and final Guardians of the Galaxy book isn’t a patch on his first unfortunately. The story is really flat and uninteresting - the Church aren’t good villains, none of the characters have compelling storylines and the whole thing feels vague and half-baked.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The book opens with a godawful annual featuring some of the worst comics writers in the business like Tini Howard, Zac Thompson and Lonnie Nadler cranking out some dismal stories about Adam Warlock and Darkhawk that are pure torture to wade through. Hated them all and forgot them as I was reading them - they’re utterly disposable sludge.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Cates’ main story doesn’t have much excitement going on. The Church is winning until the last part when they have to lose and everyone in the meantime is treading water. What’s in the cocoon is mildly surprising until you remember that death, particularly in regards to this series, is a farce.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Which is the same complaint I had for the first book - if dying characters are an irrelevant joke, don’t make the reader go through the motions of making it seem like they’re really dying when there was never any chance of that happening. That’s why the “Rocket dying” storyline feels like such a waste of time.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Cory Smith’s art is every bit as excellent as Geoff Shaw’s in the first book - no complaints there; this book looks amazing. The story actually picks up slightly by the end as the characters fight back against the Church but it’s belated and predictable.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Mostly, Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 2: Faithless is a too boring and unmemorable read - a disappointing conclusion to what was a corking first book.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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But whose? All eyes point towards Gamora, who’s missing, presumed green. It’s a veritable Royal Rumble of the Marvel Cosmic as multiple teams set out to beat the other. This is Thanos’ Final Gauntlet!</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The God Country and Crossover creative team of Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw reunite once more to bring us the most entertaining Guardians book in quite some time.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Part of that is in having so much going on with so many characters that there’s nary a dull moment. Hela leads the Black Order in hijacking Knowhere and then looting Thanos’ headless body, before hunting for his head; Eros/Starfox, Thanos’ brother, leads the Gamora kill team of Gladiator, Nebula and the Cosmic Ghost Rider; while Star-Lord and Groot are joined this time by Beta Ray Bill, Moondragon, Phyla-Vell, and Lockjaw (Drax is “dead” and Rocket is on the outs), on the Gamora save team.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Along the way are cameos from the Collector, Annihilus and Richard Ryder’s Nova. It really feels like a celebration of the rich tapestry that makes up Marvel Cosmic. It’s also impressive that Cates is able to keep this many plates spinning and not have any fall - each team’s storyline feels coherent and interesting.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It’s more than just a line-up refresh though as Groot is changed quite radically in this one. He can speak normally now - I think Quill said “I am Groot” more than Groot in this book! - and seems to be in some teen rebellion phase, rocking a mohawk and a small army of tiny Groots called Stab!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Shaw’s art is the strongest it’s been to date. I loved the Negative Zone scene as two great villains - Annihilus and Hela - faced each other down, both looking incredible. There are also brilliant shots of Gladiator and Nova too that showcase how cool those characters are.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">If there’s a complaint to be had then it’s the silliness of death in superhero comics. Multiple characters here are presumed “dead” - until they’re not and are walking around fine within pages. Even Thanos, whose “death” the entire story is built around, was never going to be dead, really. Given how pointless the story is, the faux weight the script gives these deaths, only to turn around and undo them moments later, is the only eye-rollingly tiresome quality in an otherwise solid book.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I loved the Gamora scene when Star-Lord et al. catch up with her and she shows how she earned her nickname “Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy” - the fight beats, the art, it all comes together beautifully. In fact, every scene Gamora’s in is flat out great - if you’re a fan of this character, you’re gonna love how Cates has written her here.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">But then this book is well worth checking out too if you’re simply after a great comic and/or happen to be a fan of Guardians/Marvel Cosmic. I had no expectations going into this one and had a blast - Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 1: The Final Gauntlet is the most fun this series has been in years.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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But it turns out that beneath their armour there is… (Transformers -) More Than Meets The Eye!</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">One of the big comics news stories from last year (which shows you how small the comics world is that something like this counts as “big news”) was that Robert Kirkman’s Skybound had acquired the Transformers and GI Joe licences from IDW and were relaunching them at Image. Void Rivals is the first series in what Kirkman is calling the “Energon Universe”, a shared universe that includes the two toy brands and this, a new original. And is it good? Is it *beep*!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Reuniting with his Oblivion Song (an even worse sci-fi series definitely worth continuing to ignore) artist, Lorenzo de Felici, Kirkman’s Void Rivals is little more than a watered-down Star Wars-esque space opera with a couple of pointless Transformers cameos for the fanboys. I forget the names of the two leads but they’re basically Han and Leia clones, both in character and their dynamic, who whizz bang woohoo their way across the stars dodging space lasers and mean aliens and whatnot. It’s about as compelling as your average Star Wars comic, ie. not very.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The twist reveal at the end of the first issue is kinda corny - the premise has been done many times before - and becomes progressively stupider once you realise they come from a world shaped like a literal ring that is two halves of the same ring!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Even before the Transformers cameos, Kirkman’s hinting hard that this is Transformers-adjacent with the recognisable subtitle and the contrived uniforms the two characters wear that make them look conveniently robot-like. Does that mean you need to read this prior to the first Transformers book, if you’re planning on doing that? *Beep* no! This is completely disposable pap - just jump straight into the Transformers book if that’s your aim; the two cameos in this one are irrelevant.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The “Handroid” was a clever touch, de Felici’s art is decent and he makes the Transformers look cool, and the cameos themselves are actually among the few interesting parts of the story. I feel like Kirkman could write a solid Transformers book, which I’m sure he will in the near future.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Otherwise, Void Rivals is a read you can safely a-void whether or not you’re a Transformers/GI Joe fan. More than meets the eye? Eh, not really. Just another bad Robert Kirkman comic.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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That pretty much sums up every story in Kazuo Umezz’s Cat-Eyed Boy, Volume 1, the least compelling manga of his I’ve read to date.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">This edition is made up of five stories of varying lengths, none of which were any good. Like another of Umezz’s books Orochi, the titular character is a framing device for the ensuing story, though the Cat-Eyed Boy stories are more yokai(Japanese for “monster”)-focused, and the character occasionally plays a bigger role in the stories than simply the audience stand-in/observer.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The Immortal Man is about a deformed man who bothers the kid of a rich family - with a secret. The Ugly Demon is about a physically ugly kid who grows up to be an ugly person on the inside who does ugly things. The Tsunami Summoners is a Cat-Eyed Boy origin story as well as being about some yokai wanting to bring a tsunami to destroy the nearby village for some reason.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The One-Legged Monster of Oudai is the least memorable story here and is basically about a monster showing up to say boo to a bunch of people. Which is essentially the outline for the final and longest story, The Band of One Hundred Monsters, Part One, where a number of monsters frighten people, among them a manga artist and a politician.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It’s an odd collection. The writing is very childish (the Band of One Hundred Monsters have a yokai handbook and business cards, with the stated aim “to bring fear and shock upon this world”!) and yet the art and general content clearly isn’t intended for kids. Childish adults then, perhaps? Which I am, but I needed more sophisticated storytelling than what there is on offer in this book.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Cat-Eyed Boy, Volume 1 is full of clunky, hammy pseudo-horror manga that hasn’t aged well since it first appeared decades ago. I was bored and unimpressed throughout and won’t be checking out further books in the series. Kazuo Umezz is a decent mangaka though I would recommend his better series, The Drifting Classroom, over Cat-Eyed Boy if you’re interested in this creator.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Sue and Alicia visit a town where everyone forgets everyone, the Four save a stranded alien vessel, and Ben and a dog wake up in a falling house - wass happenin?!</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Ryan North’s second Fantastic Four book is not very fantastic unfortunately. I like that the series is still these self-contained science/mystery stories similar to classic Star Trek, rather than the tired trope of superheroes vs supervillains, but the stories in this book don’t really cut it.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The first of the four stories sees Doom trying to solve the problem that got the Four into their current trouble, because apparently Doom cares quite a bit about his goddaughter Valeria. It’s a slow burn of a story and yet it’s also the best one here. I wasn’t that interested in what was happening, and nothing was resolved at the end anyway, but it’s cool to see Doom in action, reminding anyone who needed it just how powerful he is (and why he was so obviously the best candidate for the next MCU big bad). Iban Coello’s art is excellent too - some wonderful splash pages in this one.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">North seems to enjoy putting Alicia, Ben’s wife, into stories about mysterious towns with supernatural secrets because he did it in the opening story of the first book and he does it again in the two-part story in this book with Sue. The Fantastic wives investigate a town that has a Twilight Zone-ish atmosphere to it, which sounds compelling but quickly becomes tedious.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Similarly, the stranded alien ship story and Ben and the dog did nothing for me. They’re not badly written or drawn, they’re just not entertaining and failed to hold my attention - they were an unrewarding chore to get through.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">So, yeah, Fantastic Four is back to being the dull title it all-too-frequently is after Ryan North’s first promising book. If you enjoyed the first volume in this series, don’t get your hopes up for Fantastic Four, Volume 2: Four Stories About… Zzz…</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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But Titan lurks within Hulk’s decaying brain - and is about to emerge…</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Hulk, Volume 2: Hulk Planet is the final book in Donny Cates and Ryan Ottley’s brilliant, if short-lived, series and it’s unfortunately a damp squib to bow out on.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Part of that is possibly because Cates only wrote two of the six issues collected here (Ottley wrote the others, in addition to drawing them) but I wonder if the book would’ve been any better if he had written all of them because the story is no great shakes. The Hulk society is kinda blah and Hulk doesn’t do much with them besides play their sport Godball before Titan emerges for a generic smackdown.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Perhaps Cates would’ve written Titan better than Ottley because I feel like the character has the potential to be compelling and Ottley’s treatment of it is muddled - I’m still not sure what Titan is meant to be or why - and devolves into your typical big bad that Hulk gotta punch until the pages run out.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">So why did Cates only write two issues if he’s meant to be writing all of them? He relapsed into using drugs again and got divorced, so I think he ended up missing deadlines as a result and Ottley was forced to pick up the slack. Cates also went through a near-fatal car accident in 2023 that gave him short-term amnesia, but the issues Ottley wrote all came out in early 2023 so I think the car accident followed these and so the reason Cates missed these issues is drugs/divorce-related. But the long-term reason for why this Hulk series ended so abruptly and why there haven’t been any new Cates/Marvel comics for over a year now is due to the car accident (I should mention though that I’m just speculating about the timeline so I might be wrong about it).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The Doc Samson scenes early on were some decent character-building stuff and Ottley’s art has been consistently high quality throughout this series. But the fresh, intense comics that made up the first couple books in this run (confusingly, Hulk Vs Thor: Banner of War isn’t counted as “Vol 2” even though it’s the book sandwiched between Smashtronaut! and Hulk Planet) is absent from this weak, forgettable final volume. I still recommend this Hulk series if only for the first two books, but don’t expect the same high quality from previous books. And here’s wishing Donny Cates a full recovery and return to comics in the near future.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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My review’s full of spoiler-y stuff so if you’re planning to read this book and that sorta thing bothers you, stop reading the review now. But if you’re simply after a TL/DR version of this review: Everett’s novel is unnecessary, adds little - worse, detracts even - to the original source material and Twain’s novel remains the better book to read of the two, yes, including the “problematic” language and racial stereotypes.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">If you’ve not read Huck Finn before, the story is set in pre-civil war America, in Missouri, one of the slave states, where Huck Finn, a young white roustabout, and a runaway slave, Jim, go on the run together along the Mississippi River - adventures ensue. In Twain’s novel, the two are separated and Huck becomes hostage to a couple of con artists before being reunited with Jim for the final act of the story.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Everett retells Twain’s story and then adds his own material once Huck and James are separated. His contribution is that James and a white-passing black man called Norman hatch upon a scheme to sell James, then James runs away once Norman pockets the cash, and they repeat this until James has enough money to buy his family from slavery and head north. There’s also a very corny Hollywood-esque ending that’s more uplifting for James than the one in Twain’s novel, and Everett reveals that Huck is James’ son - this last detail is probably the most controversial.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Did we need a retelling of Huck Finn? No. Everett’s story is not compelling enough. It more realistically details the horrors of slavery (the sequence with James, Norman and a teenage slave called Sammy is particularly harrowing) and does what I think it sets out to do, namely portray James as a real person and not a racist cartoon. In this novel, the slaves pretend to speak in a cartoonish slave’s voice, as they did in Twain’s novel (and other media from yesteryear) but really speak normal English when not around white ears, in many cases better than the white characters themselves. James strives for dignity and equity in a time and place where both were unheard of for black people and so he’s very easily a sympathetic character.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The story as Twain told it was originally interesting, but re-reading it in Everett’s hands is less so as there’s not much added to it. James encounters more horrors that we’ve seen him encounter and it’s repetitive and grim for the sake of grimness.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Does anyone read Huck Finn today and think black people are the racist cartoons that appeared in the narrative? I don’t think so. Though I also don’t think it’s unfair to say that there were some black people who were like this back then either hence why Twain chose to write them like that - there was no ulterior agenda at play for him. Twain’s portrayal of black characters may be racial stereotypes but they’re not enduring ones, and the novel itself, including Huck, are so anti-racist and progressive, especially for its time, that it’s amazing so many people are willing to condemn Twain and his novel because he used the n-word liberally without considering anything else about the book’s contents.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">And what was the point of making Huck James’ son? On one level it felt like petty points-scoring against a long-dead author who can’t object - like Everett was claiming this iconic American literary character as “one of theirs” and, not as the white establishment believes, “theirs” - nyah nyah nyah nyaaah! It’s also not his character to change so dramatically.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Part of the beauty of Twain’s character is that Huck sees the injustice of slavery and decides for himself that it’s wrong - at a time when he’s literally told that if he helps a slave it’s a “sin”. Huck isn’t being progressive for fashionable reasons, he’s doing it because he’s a humanitarian. He isn’t choosing to treat Jim as an equal because he’s half-black himself but because that’s how he sees Jim and all black people - he recognises their common humanity.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It’s important that Huck is white because he represents the future society, the better society, that Twain wanted to hold up to his audience, at a time when Jim Crow was in full swing, and point to as an example of what we should aspire to be, and he wanted that audience - primarily white - to see themselves in Huck and replicate his behaviour, to make that vision a reality.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Huck and Jim’s relationship is one of the great literary friendships in part because they’re two individuals who bond over their shared humanity and experiences, not because they’re related. It feels like Everett’s revision of Huck diminishes the character’s obvious qualities that makes him such a unique literary creation for no good reason whatsoever.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I can understand wanting to give James a better ending than the one he got in Huck Finn but the ending of this novel is down there with the trashiest fan-fic - it’s pure Hollywood cheese. A bad ending to a bad novel.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Percival Everett’s James provides greater, more realistic detail of the antebellum south than you get in Twain’s Huck Finn, though any decent history book will do the same, so that hardly makes Everett’s novel a necessary companion piece to Twain’s. It’s also well-written, as all of Everett’s novels are. But Twain’s Huck Finn remains the only novel of this story worth reading - James is ultimately a pointless addition that’s little more than reactionary fan fiction, as much a product of our time as Twain’s novel was of his.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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So when the grieving, newly-crowned King of Asgard, whose dead dad now inhabits Mjolnir, hears the Starship Hulk is nearby, Thor realises he can do some Avenger-ing and work out his grief at the same time. Is time for Hulk vs Thor - ding ding!</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Hulk vs Thor: Banner of War has no right to be as good as it is. It embodies the quintessential superhero cliches of a forced crossover where one infallible character fights another infallible character for no real reason (talking beforehand? Pfft!), with no real stakes or consequences, with no real result - in theory? I should hate this. And yet it’s brilliant.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Like most sequels, Donny Cates does what he did in the first book again: having Hulk battle in ever-more-intense encounters as the story progresses, escalating the tension until it reaches a fever pitch. Why it’s so impressive, and stands out from so many other superhero battles (not least previous Thor/Hulk matchups - a fact that’s referenced too), is the level of intensity it begins at: it starts with Hulk lifting himself through Mjolnir leaving a gaping hole in his chest!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">From there, it’s the nuttiest fight ever. Iron Man adapts a Celestial into the most insane Hulk Buster armor and it gets more bonkers in each succeeding chapter. You think Hulk’s reached his zenith of fury but nope - here’s another level of madness! Cates takes full advantage of the fact that he’s writing two of the most powerful Marvel superheroes by crafting the most extreme scenes of devastation. It’s genuinely exciting stuff to read and I loved it.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">There’s a flashback that explains what went down in El Paso (so it turns out that you don’t need to have read Al Ewing’s preceding Hulk run after all) which only makes the mystery behind the carnage all the more puzzling and interesting.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The only weak spot in the book is the final chapter. Even without knowing Cates bowed out for that one and Daniel Warren Johnson stepped in, I could tell it was a lesser writer taking over. Suddenly the pacing slowed at a time when it should’ve crescendoed and clunky exposition and overwriting takes over. The ending itself is way too neat as well. The story was over and the characters needed to be reset and it’s executed in the most artless way to do that.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Martin Coccolo’s art was really good. The splash pages stand out beautifully, like Hulk and Thor initially squaring off in a Street Fighter 2-type screen, or the aforementioned extreme scenes of devastation being rendered perfectly. The design for Tony’s Celestial armor was amazing and Odin’s never looked better. Gary Frank’s covers are fantastic too.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The book follows the well-worn path of most superhero vs stories and yet Cates found a way of making the template so much fun to read. Imaginative, exciting, cleverly-structured, and (mostly) superbly written, Hulk vs Thor: Banner of War was shockingly good, considering what it is. If you enjoyed Smashtronaut!, you’ll get the same kick out of this follow-up - what a Hulk series this is turning out to be!</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Review (Kyle Starks, Steve Pugh)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi19lGJHjLSZS7DfKP7pVqAzSzX_5yTE0gTeroWdO3lkiogBM_ct91ARMYZXkS-grdNlJgdmPd4IWn0Yv1HwVU8bc2jNju13MDzIVaKdF3Xygs6eZUZ97nH0INiyGFsYeraver-QqENjPwBK8Y-jnO0XhLqZwcAZl0NmpJY_0kVn3nBPDWaHWRXCcDO_bkA" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="260" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi19lGJHjLSZS7DfKP7pVqAzSzX_5yTE0gTeroWdO3lkiogBM_ct91ARMYZXkS-grdNlJgdmPd4IWn0Yv1HwVU8bc2jNju13MDzIVaKdF3Xygs6eZUZ97nH0INiyGFsYeraver-QqENjPwBK8Y-jnO0XhLqZwcAZl0NmpJY_0kVn3nBPDWaHWRXCcDO_bkA" width="156" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><br />Peacemaker finally has a friend: a lil pug he names Bruce Wayne. Mais sacre bleu - an evil brain in a jar called The Brain and his French-speaking gorilla henchman have kidnapped him! To get him back, Peacemaker must steal Deathstroke the Terminator’s DNA so Brain can have a badass new clone bod. And who’s coming to Peacemaker’s party on Saturday?!</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Kyle Starks and Steve Pugh give DC their best book in far too long with Peacemaker Tries Hard!, a comedy/action romp that’s oodles of fun to read.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It’s Black Label so there’s swears a-plenty (Peacemaker wears a “Fuck Beam” helmet), copious drug use (meet Snowflame, a cocaine-powered supervillain!), and a great deal of very graphic violence. It doesn’t feel gratuitous though - instead it feeds into the overall silliness and only heightens the strong humour.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Because Starks basically writes his Peacemaker like Ryan Reynolds’ box office-winning Deadpool (or John Cena’s Peacemaker - I haven’t seen the show so I don’t know): a blissfully ignorant boob, oblivious for the most part that nobody likes him - except, and importantly, the audience - who’s exceptionally deadly and unstoppable. Not that that’s a bad thing even if it is derivative (as is the John Wick premise) because that’s a great character to follow and the book definitely benefits from that approach.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">But it’s not just Peacemaker. Monsieur Mallah, the aforementioned intelligent gorilla, was a great addition, as was Richard the Red Bee and his faithful bee sidekick Michael, and Starks keeps the wonderfully batty characters coming like the Demolition Team (a construction worker-themed supervillain team, naturally) and Teen Deathstroke.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I really liked the scene where Waller thinks Bruce Wayne has been kidnapped and begins mobilising Task Force X before realising Peacemaker’s talking about his “fancy man” pug. Even a bartender in a middle-of-nowhere pub gets a few good moments in too. And of course there’s the concept of Peacemaker fighting a literal brain, as if the character is fighting intelligence itself in this comic!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Adding to Starks’ rich story is the brilliant Steve Pugh whose artwork sells the jokes perfectly. Best known for his work on the Mark Russell books Billionaire Island and The Flintstones reboot at DC a few years ago, Pugh’s experience of working with a talented satirist on comedic books shows in the evocative visuals throughout.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Starks adds layers to Peacemaker’s character through flashbacks to his painful childhood with one helluva shithead father, making him all the more sympathetic and likeable, as well as paying this off with an unexpected character at the end of the book. Even the Red Bee and Michael the bee of all characters have a shockingly moving coda to their story. Starks’ writing on this book is very impressive.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The story is a bit too slight for the length and it feels like it goes on longer than it should have. That and the predictable story - you know whether or not Peacemaker will rescue the dog/find true friends at last/stop The Brain - made it easy to put down after an issue or two.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Still, I was mostly entertained when I did pick it back up and I really enjoyed this one. What a surprise - not only did DC put out a great comic but it’s a Peacemaker comic too! Brilliant stuff from this excellent creative team - check out Peacemaker Tries Hard! for a good time.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Review (Donny Cates, Ryan Ottley)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgGYPY_L3OGH_u4TrtB288UZtbPfbHzQGqKZdgtq1lNoSDDps6IE2b05xpW2JnPAjFp77_IGuhcHST8wC18LZopJkhEQ3zXDriqC2Gdxtk5Tzd5q8GJWdFuvY_zSxKmIuoYrMX50Ue200xoaVMw579CH9K9iPnQsIUf16qXeDvQF81zt6LW-ERnQ6t0_Oi" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="325" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhgGYPY_L3OGH_u4TrtB288UZtbPfbHzQGqKZdgtq1lNoSDDps6IE2b05xpW2JnPAjFp77_IGuhcHST8wC18LZopJkhEQ3zXDriqC2Gdxtk5Tzd5q8GJWdFuvY_zSxKmIuoYrMX50Ue200xoaVMw579CH9K9iPnQsIUf16qXeDvQF81zt6LW-ERnQ6t0_Oi" width="156" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><br />“These waves do not crash on me. They break on me. Because I am strong.”</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">- Bruce Banner, mad scientist par excellence</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Leaving death and destruction behind him in El Paso, Bruce Banner’s psyche has splintered into three: Hulk’s body has been transformed into a starship(!), Banner is captain on the bridge, and Hulk is trapped in engineering as anger fuel for the starship. Together they are: a Smashtronaut! With the Avengers after him, Banner turns the Starship Hulk to space, never to return to Earth…</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I gave up on Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk run early on so it’s been a minute since I’ve read a Hulk book and I’m unsure what the El Paso incident was (but you can guess given that it’s the Hulk) or why Banner seems to have become completely evil (I’m sure it gets explained later on and if it doesn’t? Banner’s just evil in this one - that’s fine). Not knowing though doesn’t impinge on the enjoyment of this comic and I’m glad I gave Donny Cates and Ryan Ottley’s turn on Hulk a chance (purely for the batty subtitle) as Smashtronaut! is the best Hulk book I’ve read in yonks.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The premise sounds abstract but we’ve had Hulk and Banner as separate characters talking to one another for years so this is just a reframing of that idea, with the physical Hulk presented as a starship and the other two as figures in its head (the origin for the “starship” is thankfully included at the very end in the Free Comic Book Day short featuring MODOK).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">As cerebral as this all sounds, the story takes the form of a familiar one to Hulk fans with Hulk smashing like crazy anything in his path for most of the book and Banner clinging on for the ride. Cates masterfully ratchets up the chaos as the story progresses, quite literally through Banner pushing up the switch from 1-10 to get more “fuel” from Hulk as the starship encounters bigger and more dangerous threats.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The insane intensity is probably what all Hulk comics should be, given the concept of the character, but you rarely see it at this heightened, tense level that you really feel, which only makes it all the more entertaining. It’s also really effective at keeping you turning the pages so I easily finished the book in one sitting.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The surprises keep a-comin in this comic. Marvel normally warns readers about their more adult books but there’s no “MAX” label on this one even though Ryan Ottley’s art is consistently and wonderfully gory throughout. Hulk is ruthless in this one, pulverising and obliterating anything and anyone in his way which, on the page, takes the form of him screaming while whatever was foolish enough to try and hit him is reduced to paste form cascading in globs around him. But even the “starship” takes damage and limbs are torn off with zero censorship. This is the perfect art treatment for this story and if the comics industry is done with those useless warning labels, I’m all for that too.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The story even manages to end on Hulk doing something heroic, so that he doesn’t close out his book looking like a bloodthirsty villain, without it feeling contrived. Hulk smashing stuff feels a bit repetitive at times and I was disappointed to see the Multiverse creep in - this concept is so played out and cliche by now; I’d be happy never to see this in anything for a few years - but otherwise I loved this book.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Hulk, Volume 1: Smashtronaut! is a really excellent, tightly-written, compelling, and well put-together book by both Cates and Ottley. If you’re after a fun, exciting Hulk comic, you can't go wrong here. Great stuff, guys - well done!</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Review (Ryan North, Iban Coello)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh68Wxgr800h0tvZ5hfsoyEEvi2CleUxkFAjESIcbsi7j502n9aUSMB280l381Bifn-wMluIBappW_a6r7XDRuGzPq1AXyoTRkwcwuBTZlaSPnzbPx7qxsfb7jzOW589CQ-3d36dznJjHTVnD8-Ci1aFUgEJ-haevihmey5rm8rloCSfY9ZHpKEYGKHcsax" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="260" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh68Wxgr800h0tvZ5hfsoyEEvi2CleUxkFAjESIcbsi7j502n9aUSMB280l381Bifn-wMluIBappW_a6r7XDRuGzPq1AXyoTRkwcwuBTZlaSPnzbPx7qxsfb7jzOW589CQ-3d36dznJjHTVnD8-Ci1aFUgEJ-haevihmey5rm8rloCSfY9ZHpKEYGKHcsax" width="156" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><br />Ben and Alicia find themselves in 1947 small town ‘murica. Sue and Reed are stuck in another small town - full of Doombots what don’t know they’re Doombots?! And Johnny plays at being a convenience store woman. All puzzling situations, but how come they ain’t together - wha hoppen to the Fantastic Floor?!</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Is this the best Fantastic Four series in a decade? You bet your sweet bippy it is! (Disclaimer: I don’t know what a bippy is. Answers on a postcard to nobodycares@cancelmenow.com for a no prize) I’m as ashocked as you are that Ryan North’s written a pretty decent book in Fantastic Four, Volume 1: Whatever Happened to the Fantastic Four? which seems better still in comparison to Dan Blob’s preceding awful run on the title.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I get that the FF are superheroes but I always preferred when their stories weren’t about them going up against their rogues gallery, a la most Marvel characters’ books, and instead had sci-fi adventures that were about them exploring and sometimes solving the unknown. North seems to feel the same way as he’s written a FF book about just that, and it’s all the better for it.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The first half of the book, where the characters are separated and doing their own thang, is oddly the best part. Ben and Alicia’s opening story is both entertaining and oddly moving (it’s a mix of at least two great movies - answers on a postcard to ishereallydoingthisbitagain@hahadanblob.com); Sue and Reed’s adventure has some effective horror moments that hearken back to the best of the Twilight Zone; and Johnny’s political dabbling isn’t so propagandist that the story doesn’t forget to also entertain, which it does, although it’s the weakest of the three standalones. North is known for his light, banterous fare (Squirrel Girl, Adventure Time) but he’s much better and less irritating when he’s not going for his version of “funny” and playing it straight - the Johnny story is the one time where the comedy comes close to stepping all over and undermining the drama.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I was interested in finding out the big mystery for why the Four split up and the reveal isn’t bad - Ben and Alicias’ reactions are all the more convincing given they’re parents of young kids, and it sets up the larger storyline North’s going for in this series. The second half of the book though definitely feels less compelling once they’re reunited as a team. North’s still going for imaginative sci-fi stories but they’re suddenly not as compelling. Maybe it’s because he has to find things for everyone to do and it feels forced/a case of too many cooks, maybe it’s the quipping overload, or maybe the two-parter 4-D story was just too abstract and ultimately uninteresting, but I was pretty checked out by the end.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Iban Coello and Ivan Fiorelli’s art is consistently solid enough for a superhero book. Nothing too flashy, nothing too bad - I didn’t love it but I don’t have any complaints either. The Thing isn’t the easiest character to draw but both manage it well. Speaking of consistency, the Alex Ross covers are great as always.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The book ends on a note I don’t think we’ve seen the FF in before (although we have for other Marvel characters) and I’m on the fence as to what it means for the quality of upcoming books. But Ryan North has surprised me enough with this first one to make me curious about the next so I’ll keep going with it for now. This one’s half a strong book but it’s half more than I was expecting. Whatever happened to the Fantastic Four? They became worth reading again!</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Now, the Brits having perfected its use, the Russians have stolen it back. The man tasked with retrieving it and killing the thieves? Bond. Jamesh Bond. Da da duun da da! Doo doo doo doo… etc.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Garth Ennis, the most seasoned comics writer of gun-wielding sociopaths, is a good fit for another character that fits the bill: James Bond. And Ennis’ first issue, while not even attempting to reinvent the wheel, is an auspicious beginning to this new series.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The opening scene is good. We meet a drug cartel crime family whose patriarch is ranting about vengeance and I was thinking, oh yeah, I know where this is headed, and immediately felt less excited. But then Ennis does something that instantly changes the trajectory of that storyline and had me thinking that Bond in Ennis’ hands feels more fresh and exciting.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Immediately contrary to that feeling (what a rollycoasty!) is the typical Bond checklist that Ennis faithfully runs through next: the quippy convo with Moneypenny, the briefing from M, more quippery with Q, and then onto the story proper. Which isn’t to say that any of that is boring to read - with Ennis, it’s rendered well - but it’s still very by-the-numbers Bond and unexciting to see.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The final part of the issue is similarly more flat table-setting but the ending injects the story once again with more pep and makes me want to see what happens next. Ennis’ Bond certainly lives up to the comic’s subtitle - Your Cold, Cold Heart - as he coolly delivers death in two scenes without so much as a raised eyebrow.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Serious Ennis is much more preferable than Whacky Ennis (longtime readers of this writer will know exactly what I mean). A few years ago, he wrote an abysmal Bond pastiche called Jimmy’s Bastards which was an entire series that was somehow made up of one bad joke and the Bond character in that title - the whole series, in fact - was painfully unfunny to read. So I’ll take the more restrained version of the character we see in this comic, over the more daffy type that Ennis could’ve written, every single time.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Rapha Lobosco isn’t called upon to draw anything that showcases his abilities - a lot of the comic is set in ordinary surroundings with people talking. On one page near the end though he’s able to shock the reader with his visuals. The art so far isn’t that special, nor is it that bad - like Ennis’ story, it’s so-so, but could be potentially better later on down the line.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Which is how I’d rate James Bond: 007 #1: decent with a chance of things becoming great - or bad - as the story arc plays out. It’s a promising start though, especially given how many brilliant comics Ennis has written about a guy with a gun and a dark narrative tone. This story arc seems worth checking out whether you’re a fan of the writer or the character, or both.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Nick Maandag sure is in his latest collection of absurdist comics, Harvey Knight’s Odyssey!</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Nick himself stars in two of the three stories. In The Plunge, he fascinates his co-workers with his French Press as they gather around his desk to witness his majestic plunging of the top down before pouring a cup of coffee. Oooo. And yes, that is the entire “story” - and yet, it’s not boring? It’s so determinedly mundane that it’s fascinating and becomes oddly amusing by the end. It’s not an amazing comic but it’s surprisingly not bad considering what it is.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Full Day follows a day in the life of Nick Maandag as he deals with surly street sweepers, an overly-sexed homeless old lady, and the inanities of office work. This one has a lot more going on than just pouring coffee (what a statement) but it’s about as enjoyable and humorous as The Plunge. The homeless lady is the funniest part of it but most of it is fairly forgettable.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Harvey Knight’s Odyssey is the longest story here. It’s also the most surreal story of the bunch as we follow Harvey and his braindead assistant practice their bizarre religion of light and dark; search for a missing tanning bed; murder; go on cake-based TV interview shows; stage a play; open a pet-grooming shop - and so on in that vein.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It’s utterly bonkers and hit-or-miss with the comedy. Your mileage will vary but I liked the TV interview part and the science experiments Harvey’s assistant conducts. It’s like reading a comic about Blackadder and Baldrick if both characters were Baldrick. Nearly every scene set in that church was immensely dull (unfortunately there’s quite a few), as were the stage play parts, and when they got to the pet-grooming shop it definitely felt like the madness had gone on too long. As is the case with all of the stories here, a mixed bag of amusing and boring.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The stories aren’t the most impressive, in part because they feel so pointless, but they’re also notable for being unpredictable and original, as well as sometimes genuinely funny. I didn’t love it as much as The Follies of Richard Wadsworth but Harvey Knight’s Odyssey is worth checking out if you’re a fan of this creator or just oddball comedy along the lines of the sketches of Tim Robinson, David Cross and Tim Heidecker.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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What could possibly go wrong - certainly not murder most foul?! Moo ha ha ha haaaa…. zzz…</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Peter “Mid At Best/Mostly Overrated Crap” Swanson’s novella The Christmas Guest is, I think meant to be, his contribution to the Christmas ghost story subgenre except it’s barely either a ghost or Christmas story, and not even a halfway decent book at that too.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I mention some minor spoilers about the second half of the book so fair warning now. Plough on if you don’t care about spoilers or come back once you’ve experienced the boredom for yourself - either way I’m not recommending The Christmas Guest.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The first half of the book is the immensely tedious journal of the American student Ashley as she moronically squees her way through a Downton Abbey fantasia. She’s a dull girl who moons over her friend Emma’s dreaaaaammmmy brother Adam and nothing happens until near the end of the journal. It’s so boring to read so much banal setup.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Thankfully that’s the worst part of the book, but it only marginally improves following the mid-story twist as we find out Ashley is murdered by Emma, who then goes on to steal Ashley’s identity and has been living for the last 25 years in New York as Ashley. Why? Turns out Emma’s brother Adam is a murdering psychopath and to throw the police off his scent, Emma steps up to help out her twin by murdering Ashley in a similar fashion while Adam’s on a jolly in London, thus giving him a solid alibi.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The Gone Girl-esque twist is a cheap trick, especially as it’s derivative of that bestselling book, but it’s still effective - although that might be because the first half of the book is so thuddingly dreary that anything remotely interesting happening by that point feels extra-exciting by comparison.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Swanson doesn’t write Emma’s voice in a way that makes her feel like a sociopath so it’s not really convincing. And the momentary rise in interest is undercut by Emma recounting most of what we already know of the first half, so the narrative shortly lapses back into coma-inducing mundanity.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Ashley returns as a Bob Marley-esque ghost each Christmas, haunting Emma’s conscience, even though that wouldn’t really bother a sociopath as they don’t have those (this is also the one feeble attempt at making this a ghost story) and we find out what ol’ Adam’s been up to in the intervening years (more killing) and he gets his comeuppance, as does Emma, it’s implied.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Ashley’s ghost was unexpected given how little supernatural shenanigans had happened by that point, but it was a welcome surprise, and I’m glad Swanson gave us a resolution on Adam and Emma’s murderous ways to make for a more satisfying read, but the overall story is still of very unengaging and forgettable drek. A frozen turkey of a book, The Christmas Bore is definitely one guest you don’t want to invite over to your place at any time of the year.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Maxwell Prince, Martin Simmonds)<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg0yDPYgRKKNtAJbm_h6cu6P4cFIIMMfxJClnfbJ0nJ8IUhhpMfuNaMq_8TXwzjf1HKih4QKQcLIBau51-24bgt_Sz6zInNCxbr4kDprJ0-V38QQlicuxtqWowA8el3hhVla8roOpjN4MSW3HeC--VdPEYy2XM2zld2-jD-0y5HUhQ0VJ3oB7XRH-riqUeZ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="976" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg0yDPYgRKKNtAJbm_h6cu6P4cFIIMMfxJClnfbJ0nJ8IUhhpMfuNaMq_8TXwzjf1HKih4QKQcLIBau51-24bgt_Sz6zInNCxbr4kDprJ0-V38QQlicuxtqWowA8el3hhVla8roOpjN4MSW3HeC--VdPEYy2XM2zld2-jD-0y5HUhQ0VJ3oB7XRH-riqUeZ" width="156" /></a></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;"><br />Swan Songs is a collection of six comics loosely connected by the theme of the end of something, ie. the end of the world/a marriage/a sentence, etc. W. Maxwell Prince specialises in these kind of one-and-done comics collections - his Ice Cream Man series with Martin Morazzo has the same format and subversive, dark tone - but unfortunately Swan Songs isn’t one of his better books.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The End of World, drawn by Martin Simmonds, is about a guy getting a gardening magazine for his dying mother as civilization crumbles around him. Like the majority of these stories, Prince doesn’t do anything too surprising with the premise and the stories often play out quite forgettably, as this one does. I liked that final image at least.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The End of a Marriage, drawn by Caspar Wijngaard, is the story of a couple’s relationship and its demise as their divorce depicts them as mediaeval knights, samurai and superheroes battling. Again, the art is the star of this story.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The End of the End of the World, drawn by Filipe Andrade, is a plain boring story of the post-apocalypse with the worst art in the book.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The End of a Sentence, drawn by Caitlin Yarsky, follows a man who improbably likes madlibs, recently released from prison, whose brother ensnares him in a Point Break-style robbery. The ending is kinda cute in how it asks the reader to decide the character’s fate with madlibs of their own, though the comic as a whole feels like Prince came up with the ending first and worked backwards from there.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The End of Anhedonia (a lack of pleasure from life’s experiences), drawn by Alex Eckman-Lawn, is about a guy getting hypnotic treatment to help cure his condition. The story has the most interesting art in the book due to the dream-like world it takes place in, allowing Eckman-Lawn to play with surrealist imagery.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The final story is The End of the Sidewalk, drawn by Martin Morazzo, which is both an Ice Cream Man tie-in and a homage/parody of Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. The comic is full of bad poetry telling the story of a man in a mental asylum and how it affects his wife and daughter on the outside. Really didn’t care for the terrible rhyming or the juvenile story - once again, the comic is saved by decent art with Morazzo drawing in a more spare, but still effective, style than he usually does.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I found Swan Songs to be unimpressive, dull reading without any standout stories and only the occasionally intriguing art saved it from being a total loss. Definitely only one for the die-hard fans of this author as it’s among his most forgettable collections.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Which is why he becomes so fixated on the new masked vigilante that appears in Gotham: The Batman. He represents justice and positive change to all the wrongs Edward sees in his everyday life. But the obsession soon sours, warping Edward into the Riddler we meet in the 2022 movie.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">In his foreword, Paul Dano explains that this comic started life as an acting exercise where he wrote the backstory of The Riddler, whom he played in the most recent Batman movie, to understand how he ended up as the person we meet on screen. Except it’s not that convincing an origin or an especially good story, much like the movie ended up becoming.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It starts well. It’s initially about modern alienation - loneliness, lack of community, helplessness and frustration at the perceived breakdown of society - and I feel like if this was a comic about just that and how a regular person overcomes or makes their peace with that, this would be a much better book. But it’s not - it’s a superhero comic - so those aspects become overshadowed by a hackneyed plot about organised crime and Batman punching crooks, which has been done to death over the decades, and what seems fresh and compelling devolves into dreary, trite melodrama.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Edward’s sad childhood in the orphanage is similarly predictable, and then - very suddenly - Edward goes from introverted and bashful to full-on nutjob and transforms into the Riddler. It’s too abrupt and arbitrary - Edward has to become the Riddler by the end of the book, we’re running out of pages, quick, make him the Riddler!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I liked Stevan Subic’s art. Dano mentions Francis Bacon’s Head VI as a touchstone for this book and Subic seems to have taken that painting to heart, really channelling it into the visuals on every page. Some of the art is really inspired - one page shows the Gotham skyline that looks like Batman’s cowl in the background and Joker’s laughing mouth in the foreground; very impressive stuff. Edward is also drawn as Dano to make that movie connection even more clear.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Paul Dano’s not a bad writer - I thought he captured the melancholic flavour of Edward quite beautifully at the start of the book - but he’s a weak storyteller whose Riddler origin breaks down the further along it goes until it’s nonsense by the end. The comic has some interesting art throughout but overall The Riddler: Year One is a poor origin story for one of Batman’s most iconic villains.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Half of them are Asian, the other half are American, so the book is divided into stories from the two halves and you can read it either way - the traditional manga right to left, or the western-style left to right.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It’s not a great collection - none of the six stories are especially brilliant and half are instantly forgettable. These ones are: Ryo Hanada’s Kamei, which is about a kappa (water yokai) and some kid; Aki Shimizu’s Film Ephemera is about a guy who can see ghosts and has one haunt his house when he starts collecting posters of Being John Malkovich; Huahua Zhu’s Shadow is about a stray cat that seems to have brought evil into its new owner’s house.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I liked the concept of Shima Shinya’s The Window, about a window that must stay permanently shut as each time you open it to look out, you see a ghostly woman - and each time you open the window, the ghost gets closer to the window… It’s little more than a premise though so it’s not the most satisfying of reads.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Similarly, Michael W. Conrad and Becky Cloonan’s Never Left has an interesting idea at its core. Two friends are reunited after 13 years apart - but why did the one friend disappear to begin with? As they go ice fishing, one of them makes a startling discovery in the ice water… The story’s a little contrived but I can forgive that given the space constraints of the format. Cloonan’s art is great as always and I liked the open-endedness of the ending - still, this story again feels like the opening act to a larger story than a self-contained one.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Sloane Leong and Leslie Hung’s Mirror, Mirror is about a young woman who discovers a haunted mirror whose reflection unleashes a “better” version of herself into the world that lives the life she wants. It’s not the most original concept but it’s a compelling one so the story isn’t a total bore.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Betwixt might interest horror manga fans, though I wouldn’t say it’s a must-read as the quality isn’t really there, and more casual comics readers can easily skip this one betwixt other, more promising choices - you’re not missing much by doing so.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Signs point to the abandoned mine near the town of Canary whose water might be contaminated and could be driving people in the surrounding area to madness and despicable acts. But what’s really going on under the ground of Canary, and what does an old case of Holt’s, involving a demented child serial killer, have to do with all of this?</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Scott Snyder and Dan Panosian’s Canary is a pretty decent western/horror that’s good when it’s focused on the western part and becomes worse when it leans into the horror.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The story starts well with a compelling, very dark crime, and we’re introduced to the similarly dark, compelling Marshal Holt whose adventures are chronicled in the pulp fiction of the time. It’s an aspect of the times that you don’t often see referenced, that the lawmen of those days were both real people and written about as if they were fictional heroes, so that was different to see. Snyder throws in a flashback to an even darker crime and the present mystery is set up in a tantalising way.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Then the pacing slows down as we’re introduced to the stock western townsfolk characters of Canary, along with the distractingly anachronistic diversity additions, and the story becomes less interesting with little conflict happening as Holt and the geologist look into Canary’s mine. The occasional fun scene breaks up the monotony though, like the inclusion of the Native Americans trying to shut the mine down for good.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Snyder tries to do too much in the second half, throwing in a rushed backstory for Holt that’s vague in how it connects to the current mystery, as well as the people involved in the mine and what they were trying to accomplish. Lots of occult details are piled on too without much payoff and cliches are tacked on that undermine the story’s seriousness. This is Holt’s last case before he retires, there’s the stock creepy old house that’s in every horror story, the monsters gurn for the audience because monsters, etc.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Snyder’s big finale is really uninspired, falling back on the usual hero fighting the monster at the end trope and it’s something he’s done so many times before - both the scenario and the type of villain, in personality and design - in titles like Batman and American Vampire that it feels rote at this point.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The obstacles the characters overcome are feeble jokes for the most part too. Descending thousands of feet below ground leads to them bleeding from the ears and lowering oxygen levels - but if you address them then they’re no longer a concern! Oh no, monsters in the way - bang, shot them dead - no more problem! If they’re that irrelevant/easy to deal with, why even mention/have these things to begin with?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Dan Panosian’s art is really good throughout. I loved the painted skies of Utah in vivid reds and yellows, indicating a hellish setting, and the period details look convincing and are impeccably drawn. Holt’s mask has a weird design to it - it’s an inverted coffin - that I’m not sure is all that effective as it's unclear what you’re looking at initially and then silly when you realise what it is, but it doesn’t detract from the quality of the artwork overall.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Canary is a decent western comic with forgettable horror features. The western elements are the most enjoyable parts and I feel like it would’ve been a more satisfying read if Snyder had stuck to the crime story, making it about the terrible things humans can do to one another rather than work in supernatural elements to explain it away (not least as it would then avoid that trite final act). The unimaginative horror stuff drags down Canary into mediocrity but it’s still worth a read if you’re after a somewhat entertaining western comic.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Though, as Ito explains in his afterword, he took more than a few liberties in adapting it - adding details, expanding stories, although he did it with the original authors’ consent - so it’s more like an interpretation of the original than a straight adaptation (but it’s unlikely anyone would know if he hadn’t mentioned this as the book is out of print!).</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">There wasn’t one great story among the 9 collected here. I liked the premise of Scarlet Circle, about a spooky secret room beneath a house with a red circle on the wall, a room where people enter it and disappear forever… Seashore isn’t bad. It’s about a haunted beach where some friends vacation and meet a pretty but somewhat-off local waitress. The final page is effective because Ito doesn’t show us the photograph but implies the weirdness - subtlety is at the heart of most great horror.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Unfortunately, Ito doesn’t apply this idea to any of the other stories so we explicitly see the horror and it comes off as silly and performative more than anything. We know immediately who the shadowy woman haunting the troubled kid in Just the Two of Us is while the conclusion of stories like The Woman Next Door or Monster Prop is the typical Ito-esque jump scare and nothing more. The two 4-page shorts, On the Utility Pole and Sign in the Field, are just creepy images rather than stories.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">But the visuals are Ito’s usual high standard - there’s no complaints of sloppiness there. Mimi is the girl who appears in all of the stories (except for Monster Prop which is a bonus story added on at the end) as a kind of connecting thread and, in keeping with Ito’s “interpretation” of the source material, he made her much prettier than in the original. Ito reuses the same half dozen or so character designs throughout his work so she’s one of his recognisable attractive girl characters from previous books.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It was interesting to me to read the Kansai dialect in English. My mother’s side of the family is from that region (Kansai is the middle part of the biggest Japanese island where Kyoto/Osaka are located) and apparently, to Japanese ears, their accent is akin to the American south - I had no idea!</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Mimi’s Tales of Terror is a well-drawn horror manga without any memorable stories. While none are so terrible as to make reading this book a bad experience, they’re still unimpressive. One of Junji Ito’s weaker collections.</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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Tony Zucco, the man who killed Dick Grayson’s parents, leaves prison early and is soon up to no good, while Heartless continues his terror campaign in Bludhaven.</span><a name='more'></a><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">It sounds like an action-packed book - should be riveting, right? And yet, it’s not. Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s Nightwing series has become the most rote, unimaginative farce of a comic by this fourth book. Nightwing is Taylor’s wish fulfiller for all the world’s wrongs - no matter the societal issue, Nightwing (and similarly Jon Kent in Taylor’s Superman series) can fix it effortlessly through flawless progressivism. And it’s so uninteresting to read as a result.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">The Maroni subplot is something that’s been done in Batman a zillion times before and Taylor brings nothing new to his version of it. Talking of derivative, Nightwing gets his own Bat-Mite for no reason: Nite-Mite. The Zucco storyline features someone literally getting shot in the head, not dying, and stopping the bleeding by putting on an eyepatch. It’s indicative of the lazy attitude of the team behind this title that something like that actually made it to publication. Nobody’s trying anymore.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">I couldn’t have cared less about the Heartless storyline because of how Taylor’s written all of the conflict in this series to date. Having seen Nightwing deal with every other threat with ease, it’s no surprise to see how this latest “threat” plays out. Also, Nightwing’s apparently leading the Justice League now and the Titans are on the way, two details that mean nothing to me as I don’t - nor want to - read those crummy titles.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Because Nightwing #100 is an anniversary issue, it’s gotta be padded out with a bunch of short stories to make it unnecessarily long. So we get Heartless’ origin, Haley the dog’s fantasy (wherein we also discover Dick is a crap dog owner), and Nightwing teaches Jon Kent to fight. None of it was entertaining.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Relentlessly tedious and instantly forgettable, Taylor and Redondo’s Nightwing hits a new low in Volume 4: The Leap… into boring!</span><br /><p></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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